How a Food Manufacturing Company Leveraged GutCheck’s Agile Quant/Qual Combo Offering to Prioritize Ideas Early on During Innovation

How Bumble Bee Foods Leveraged GutCheck’s Agile Quant/Qual Combo Offering to Prioritize Ideas Early on During Innovation The Challenge The Bumble Bee innovation team has a mission: to generate a pipeline of viable product concepts through an insight-driven process and build capabilities among a cross-functional team to drive innovation forward. They understand the importance of being able to learn from consumers and modify concepts early on in the research and development process. But they needed a common platform that could handle both qualitative and quantitative executions. They also needed a complete, affordable solution that would be quick, a vendor who is more of a partner, and a flexible team that would be able to offer market research guidance and insights throughout the entire project, from scope to final deliverable. The Multi-Phase Execution The innovation team at Bumble Bee Foods was looking to learn more about a new segment of consumers and understand their workout attitudes and behaviors, with a specific focus on eating habits as they relate to protein. The team knew there were product opportunities within this target of consumers, but needed to be able to use both their qualitative and quantitative feedback to influence the concept creation and development prior to finalizing anything. P R E S E N T E D B Y Qualitative 1. Explore the target audience’s workout behaviors 2. Identify specific areas of opportunity and appeal of tuna as a snack 3. Uncover any barriers or pain points that may be present when thinking about tuna as a snack Quantitative 1. Prioritize each concept based on key metrics: Purchase Intent, Uniqueness, Believability, Relevance, Power to Replace (current snacks) 2. Understand preferences for nutritional benefits as well as potential flavor options in forced ranking exercises Overall Research Objectives The Solution GutCheck first conducted in-depth exploratory research via an Instant Research Group™ to uncover attitudinal and behavioral trends among Bumble Bee’s specified segment of consumers who fit the demographic and custom screening criteria. The qualitative results helped yield three refined concepts, but the team still needed to bring forth one winner to move forward with, as well as dig a bit deeper into potential flavor opportunities that their specified segment would find appealing. “What GutCheck’s agile tool is able to give us in a week or two week fashion helps the company save resources in both people and money.” Kara Sterner Director of Innovation, Bumble Bee Foods “Innovation is as much about killing ideas as it is moving forward.” Kara Sterner Director of Innovation, Bumble Bee Foods Guidance Speed Throughout the research design process, you have the opportunity to modify discussion guides and questionnaires or ask us questions. The same online research strategist will work with you on all phases of your study, ensuring a higher level of consistency, quality, and a strong knowledge of your project history from start to finish. What might seem impossibly fast often falls right into our timelines! Our qual and quant friendly platform has the ability to execute both types of studies simultaneously if needed. Flexibility The GutCheck Benefit So, following the qualitative phase, the GutCheck research team then launched the second phase of quantitative concept screening. The Results Going into the multi-phase research with the GutCheck team on this particular project, the Bumble Bee innovation team had a hypothesis they needed answers for. Ultimately, the qualitative research results ended up disproving that hypothesis and opened the door for three much stronger concepts that were then tested in the quantitative phase. Since the innovation team often has several ideas they’d like to work on (sometimes 100+), prioritization is crucial; the reality is that pursuing a large number of concepts is not only time consuming but also exhausting in terms of manpower and money. After all, if a concept is going to fail, it’s better for it to fail fast—and early on in the development stage. 25 Targeted Consumers Exploration Refine Concepts Phase I 6 DAYS RECRUIT TO REPORT 200 Targeted Consumers Prioritization of 3 Refined Concepts Prioritized Concepts Phase II 5 DAYS RECRUIT TO REPORT About GutCheck GutCheck is a global, online agile market research solution that enables our clients to get quick consumer reads to address business questions, whenever they need to be answered. GutCheck’s flexible quantitative and qualitative platform enables us to instantly recruit target audiences, and our full-service team provides the insights and confidence our customers need to react and move their businesses forward. For more information: http://gutcheckit.com. P R E S E N T E D B Y 877-990-8111 [email protected] 633 17th Street, Suite 1300 Denver, CO 80202 FIND US ON ©2015 GutCheck is a registered trademark of Brainyak, Inc. All rights reserved. Various trademarks held by their respective owners. GutCheck has had the pleasure to continually provide the rich consumer insights that help the innovation team at Bumble Bee make confident decisions and answer any critical developmental questions that may pop up.